Enisled
John Sutherland: Matthew Arnold, 19 March 1998
A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., £17.99, March 1998,0 7475 3671 6 Show More
by Ian Hamilton.
Bloomsbury, 241 pp., £17.99, March 1998,
“... his own fragility’. Unexpectedly, Arnold joins the century’s other hobbling poets, Scott and Byron. The youthful dandyism, the affectation of nonchalance, was by way of compensation. Hamilton sees the fact that Arnold wrote poetry as a happy accident: the outcome of the leisure he made for himself by idling at Oxford, and thanks to family ... ”